Cardinal to everyone: more power for us please

The leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has used his Easter message to attack “aggressive secularism”…Cardinal O’Brien said the enemies of Christianity wanted to “take God from the public sphere”.

Whereas the cardinal and his all-male gang want to fill up the public square with their imagined god who endorses all their nasty encrusted hatreds and panics and secret bum-gropings. Well of course they do: that way they would have even more power than they already have. If they had enough power they could even shut up the journalists and bloggers and survivors who keep talking about all that child-rape and child-slavery.

The Cardinal said: “Perhaps more than ever before there is that ‘aggressive secularism’ and there are those who would indeed try to destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square. Religion must not be taken from the public square. Recently, various Christians in our society were marginalised and prevented from acting in accordance with their beliefs because they were not willing to publicly endorse a particular lifestyle.”

Yes yes yes, they were “prevented” from throwing gays out of hotels and yanking their adopted children away on the vicious grounds that “they were not willing to publicly endorse a particular lifestyle.” Right – consensual relationships between adults evil, child-rape by priests a little rude perhaps but nothing to fret about.

Dr Evan Harris, a campaigner for the separation of Church and state, branded the Cardinal’s remarks “paranoid and unjustified”.

He said: “It is not ‘aggressive’ to call for an end to religious privilege in society and many people of faith agree with the call for the state to be neutral in religious matters.”

He said: “What these attacks ignore is that campaigners for secularism in our public life are overwhelmingly motivated, not by anti-religious prejudice, but by a positive desire for equality and an equitable public sphere.

“These alarmist speeches, designed to stir up the faithful and foster a false narrative of persecution, are divisive and sectarian.”

Such attacks “obscured” the reality of the situation, he said. “The churches are seeking to defend a level of influence and privilege totally out of proportion to their significance,” Copson added.

25 Responses to “Cardinal to everyone: more power for us please”

Glad you picked this up. It’s a despicable attempt to paint Christians as a persecuted minority while simultaneously trying to keep equal rights from gay people and halt scientific progress. It’s perfectly in line with the persecution complex which motivates the entire religion. Disgraceful.

Cardinal O’Brien said the enemies of Christianity wanted to “take God from the public sphere”.

The capacity for the powerful to strike a pose as a besieged minority never ceases to amaze. It surely can’t, for example, have escaped the Cardinal’s attention that the organisation he represents not only controls rather a lot of schools in my part of the world but does so partly at the expense of the state?

I love the “public square” weasel words used by the defenders of religious privelege on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, if they came out and said that religion belongs in “government” or “the law”, people might understand their motives a little too well.

“various Christians in our society were marginalised and prevented from acting in accordance with their beliefs because they were not willing to publicly endorse a particular lifestyle” In fact they were unwilling to obey the democratic laws of a de facto secular society.

There is an extraordinary irony in a grown man dressed as a Christmas tree basing his (and our) morality on a reading of Leviticus: did he not feel at least a little apprehensive to be wearing ‘clothing woven of two kinds of material’ ? And did he think carefully about Lev. 19:15 ‘Do not pervert Justice’ ? Does he thunder against the eaters of prawns and lobsters? for Lev. 11:11 assures us they are an abomination.

Good point. I live near a cathedral and the priests and choir are walking about in robes quite freely in the street with no one trying to pass anti-burqa type laws against them. The streets are the “public sphere” aren’t they? If you are specific about what this “public sphere” is, i.e education, law or government you can see what he’s up to.

Washing the feet of some survivors in the public square is one way of trying to wheedle its way into their broken hearts and to that of world media. Look how humble the church is when it can stoop so low to wash the feet of those it considers intellectually/emotionally untouchable – but only touchable when it came to its own self-serving abuse.

As Shuggy says, the organisation he represents not only controls rather a lot of schools in my part of the world The same is applicable in Ireland, where over 90% of schools are run by the Roman Catholic Church. To think that it feels its being hounded by secularists is just mind-boggling.

Cardinal O’Brien reminded congregation of the pope’s plea that Christians of different denominations should rediscover their common ancestry to unite in resisting the sidelining of religion. Why would the Cardinal have reminded its own flock that Christians of other denominations should rediscover their own common ancestry, etc? Did the Cardinal use the medium of a captive audience at Easter mass to get the message across to the wider religious world out there? The church only recently trawled for Anglicans for its own church. It was very worried only about its own common ancestry then and not that of the wider religious world.

The church sees itself as the One, True, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Every other church is false. Those who do not adhere to this truth are enemies and must be prayed for and scorned.

The church is more afeared of secularists than it is of paedophiles and child clerical rapists. The former has the propensity to bring it down much more so than the latter. Secularists are more intellectual and can get to the church in ways that survivors of clerical abuse cannot.

The church recently compounded the abuse of survivors when it used them as tools to wash their feet to show the world how humble and forgiving it was. In fact, it was only drawing attention to itself and was one big publicity stunt. The survivors were specially secretly chosen behind closed doors and it was all organised between right wing Catholic conservatives over an eighteen month period. American prelates who came to Ireland on a fact-finding mission were to report to the Vatican in the aftermath. It was all one big farce. It really gets my goat when accommodationists out there think they have to help and protect the church, when the same church has so little regard for not only its only flock, but sees them as vile enemies.

O’Brien’s special pleading and craven desire for attention, coupled to a fetish for being offended, is even more pathetic considering the unjustified importance he has in Scotland. Whether it is whining about an onslaught from the secular majority, or conflating football rivalries with anti-Catholic discrimination, he is evidently too thick to see the rampant sectarianism in his words. How dare anybody think that free speech gives them the right to call him out for homophobia, or the nonsense that is having two schools under one building.

Mr. O’Brien’s rants harken back to JP2’s anti secular humanism pontificating of the 80’s. There is still power within the RCC, but what a shell it is slowly becoming when it has to seek unity with other religions to reassert its power within western society. The power will not return unless there is a theocratic revolution such as Iran had.

<blockquote>Yes yes yes, they were “prevented” from throwing gays out of hotels and yanking their adopted children away on the vicious grounds that “they were not willing to publicly endorse a particular lifestyle.”</blockquote>

Just turn the situation around and see what they think about it. A gay employee wouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against Christian customers, so why should a Christian employee be allowed to discriminate against gay customers? This is a great example of religious people becoming accustomed to special treatment. They want to be protected by the anti-discrimination laws, but if they’re asked to abide by the same laws, then they think they’re being persecuted.

In this context, I usually put the words “faith” and “faithful” in quotes.

Those people do not demonstrate faith. They demonstrate credulity.

People who profess a “faith” usually profess “faith” in a specific religion, with that specific religion’s myths and fables being part-and-parcel of what they have “faith” in. Even if that “faith” declares the creation myth to be metaphor, there is still at some point a declaration that certain stories are “true”.

For most Christians, the bible-as-metaphor stops at the end of the OT. The NT is seen as the “literal” truth. Jesus really was born of a virgin, really turned water into wine, really reanimated a corpse that wasn’t merely dead but stinking dead, and all of that.

Now there are some Christian sects and liberal Christian thinkers who would metaphorize even parts of the NT — but by and large, we’re talking about people who base their “faith” on the tales told of miracles and wonderful deeds. There was indeed a man named Jesus, and he was a very very special person, they’ll say. And the proof of that comes from the NT — even if they can’t quite tease out where real Jesus ends and metaphorical Jesus begins.

So, they’re basing their “faith” not on things unseen, but on specific stories told in a specific set of writings about someone who was, in their view, a real flesh-and-blood person. In other words, their “faith” is empirically based, and they cite as evidence (yes, the dreaded “e” word) the myths of the bible.

Rational people look at those stories and snort with derision. The evidence falls short of what is required.

This type of faith is nothing more and nothing less than credulity. Believing in a real Easter Bunny.

Just turn the situation around and see what they think about it. A gay employee wouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against Christian customers, so why should a Christian employee be allowed to discriminate against gay customers?

Cos they’re special, see? They, like, really really like their religion and thinking of Jesus makes them all warm and fuzzy in the stomach, which is basically proof that’s it’s true and reasonable and perfectly ok to use as a basis for discrimination (except it’s rarely framed by the religious as unfounded discrimination, more as ‘conscience’, of course).

I sound flippant and childish I know, but as far as I can make out this seriously is about as much reasoning religious people seem to give for why society should so blatantly work one way in their favour but not if the positions of the parties involved were switched around; I’m so often exasperated with religious people when they don’t see the undue privilege their beliefs receive, because they don’t understand that the number of people following a particular system of belief or the fervency with those beliefs are held are both irrelevant to whether they are fair, or sensible, or reasonable.

Taking religion from the public sphere… Interesting, because as I brought my daughter home from school I saw four churches and at least two signs in yards blabbering about some sort of Christian-political-get-together thing…

We can see the results of religions having their way over the secular society in Cardinal O’ Briens native Northern Ireland. As to Patten , no surprize, he is a paid up Catholic-so he emits what he is told to emit.